EAA Conference Fluff Piece

There's a fluff piece in the local press for the Trafficking Culture people in relation to the upcoming EAA conference in Glasgow which begins this week (Judith Duffy, 'Scotland's elite archaeologists target global tomb raiders' Herald Scotland Sunday 30 August 2015).

An elite (sic) team of Scottish academics is at the forefront of tackling the global trade in priceless artifacts like those looted by Daesh from ancient cities such as Syria's Palmyra. The team of archaeologists, lawyers, criminologists and anthropologists from Glasgow University - the only academic team on the planet devoted to studying the illicit trafficking in antiquities - has warned that while atrocities committed in Palmyra has focused global attention on the loss of precious heritage sites, the scale of the problem is far bigger than what is happening in Syria alone, with temples being looted every single day in some countries.

The only problem with that is that NONE of the Glasgow team are specifically working on the  issues of looting in Syria and Iraqi, preferring to visit Latin America, Greece, Thailand, Cambodia and Nepal to do their fieldwork, and one of them (Donna Yates) has consistently denied that there is even any evidence that ISIL are doing any trading in "priceless artefacts". Why the Herald Scotland spells it "artifacts" is difficult to explain (cut and paste from something handed to her by a US-educated interviewee?).